skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just read random bytes from /dev/urandom. Smart people have already taken the time to work out how to give your platform fast random number generation.

Don't use a table of primes for p and q. Look at BN_generate_prime_ex() in OpenSSL for a simple sieve algorithm. Your RSA key size is a function of the product of p and q; they should be bignums.

Incorporate an AES library. Generate AES keys by reading 128 bits of random bytes from /dev/urandom. Generate a 64 bit random number the same way, then encrypt the message in CTR mode using that 64 bit number as the nonce; you'll need a new one for every message. After encrypting with AES to generate a ciphertext, run the ciphertext through HMAC-SHA2 and append that hash to the end of the ciphertext. Encrypt the keys & the nonce with RSA and append that to the message. The receiver verifies the HMAC hash before it attempts to decrypt the AES-CTR encrypted message.

This is advice given under the assumption that you're doing this to learn stuff. Again: strongly advise you make a game out of this instead of trying to supply secure messaging to people.

If you wanted to do this for real, read instead:

http://cr.yp.to/highspeed/coolnacl-20120725.pdf
As a programmer interested in design, I didn't mind the inaccuracies. To my shame, I didn't even noticed them.

But I found the article to be quite good and useful, and it's obvious that the guy had all the good intentions.
Brad from Perfect Audience here. I owe so much to HN and all the great advice I've received on here over the years. Happy to answer questions about YC, online advertising for startups, or anything else. We're really excited to get out of the gate and "on the board."
How You F*ck Up Job Interviews
Google Introduces New Open-Source Framework for Building Reranking Models
Facebook's First Commercial
This is extortion.

There might be a way to fight them through this, if you claim that the poster didn't have the right to grant them the license:

6. Proprietary Rights/Grant of Exclusive Rights

By posting information or content to any public area of POTENTIALPREDATORS.COM, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to POTENTIALPREDATORS.COM an irrevocable, perpetual, fully-paid, worldwide exclusive license to use, copy, perform, display and distribute such information and content and to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such information and content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
I never thought the .NET Framework did enough complexity hiding to justify a 60MB installed size, especially if it was just providing a bit of plumbing to get you back down to the COM level.

Most COM interfaces support late binding, so you can easily call them from a language like JavaScript, which is already installed in Windows as part of the platform. Ten years before node.js existed, you could run this JavaScript on Windows 2000 to read and print a file:

var fso = new ActiveXObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");
if ( fso.FileExists("myfile.txt") ) {
var ts = fso.OpenTextFile("myfile.txt", ForReading);
WScript.Echo(ts.ReadAll());
WScript.Quit(0);
} else {
WScript.Echo("File Not Found");
WScript.Quit(1);
}
no, but it's the sum of seemingly un-important things that actually end up creating a great meaning. Be a part of it.
Regarding primes, you'd be better off with this kind of list : http://primes.utm.edu/lists/small/small.html#50 than with the 1k smallest ones.
No doubt they have a list of names in there that they draw a red line through after vigilantes kill them.
OK. Let's start over.

The original complaint was that someone wanted to come into the US, but the visa he wanted required that he have (at least) a bachelor's degree before he could get the visa.

My response was that this was a fairly straightforward hurdle to cross.

Pointing out that it's possible to do things differently by obtaining another type of visa really doesn't change the original situation.
We use Perfect Audience at Custora, and are really happy with it. Couldn't be easier to set up ad retargeting. And they have excellent service and support. Congrats guys!
Changing Appearance Of Element With CSS
Congrats brad!
But the odds of the thing you release actually getting used are low. So make it fast, and if it's a hit, then deal with that.
Responsive API Design
UX in Phone Support
The Zuck is sort of right though. There is no doubt that the iOS / Android FB app is pretty slow and buggy due to their dependence on HTML5. They've gotten grilled by their users in the past -- although props to them for really improving it recently.

I'm not saying that HTML5 is a bad technology or anything, it just isn't quite there yet.

Good article nonetheless.
There are 7 billion people on earth, there are 2.3 billion with Internet access as of 2011 - FB claims that 40-ish% of Internet users are monthly actives, which is clearly BS, so you don't need to get it anywhere near 8 billion. You simply need to get it near or above actual Internet access capable people.
"snark"

Guilty as charged!

""prosperity sake"" (think you mean "posterity"?)
This is because most online fraudsters over the world target US companies and individuals.
I find that incredibly funny.
Well in that case the cost of a hash-function is also not O(1) since the minimum length of a n distinct keys is log(n).

Really both a trie and a hash-function boil down to O(m) where m is the length of the key.
I think this taking the wrong lesson from Netscape. If you do a greenfield re-write of a multi-million line application you probably are going to have a bad time, but people successfully re-write smaller applications or portions of an application all the time. Since this was just a portion of the total functionality of LinkedIn, they incurred much less risk than a ground up rewrite would have.
Even better, I wonder what happens if I send a private message to all my "friends" with a link to my blog in it.

Did the like counter on my blog just go up by 500?
Does that actually work for you? I've been setting it to English and restarting the app about 5 times now and it still launches in Dutch.
I have mixed feelings about this. I had an interview at Palantir with a self-described "front-end" guy, who asked me to write an algorithm to find a number between zero and infinity, where you could pick a number and you would get a response that would tell you whether or not the number was lower or higher than the secret number. The dude had a particular form of approaching the problem that was not at all the fastest form, in fact, he insisted on starting at zero and using an algorithm that was "2x," which he insisted was "fast enough."

I thought that a system which started at zero and went up by multiples of two was obscenely slow, and I hinted at this, but he insisted on having things his way. In the end I'm sure he wrote me a bad review and I wasn't offered the job (I didn't really want it anyways, given my impression that the team I was interviewing for wasn't that focused).

In any case, I didn't go right now and say this is dumb, but I hinted at a better way, and even this hinting lead to some conflict. In the end I didn't get the job. I'm conflicted if this was the best approach. I could have pretended to be dumber than I actually am and gotten the job offer at least, which at this present moment I could probably use for leverage in the search for contracts or a job, but I couldn't bring myself to accept his not particularly good algorithm (full disclosure: the process was also affected by the fact that my flight was delayed from the east coast, that I got 4 hours of sleep, the fact that I insisted in wearing a tweed coat to the interview, which may have impacted ever important perception of "fit," and that the interview in question was a "surprise" interview after several other interviews).
I wouldn't trust Google consumer surveys that blindly either.

I ran a pricing survey there a while ago and a lot of people were willing to pay 11111111111 or 12345 dollars per month.
So I went to the Stratasys site and saw that there entry level printer was $10k, would this be the equivalent of a Ferrari vs. a kit car conversion?

Why doesn't Stratasys make a Honda Civic of 3D printers?
Thanks, I didn't know
Many thanks to you and the others for putting this information together.
Your presumption is pretty much all I can think to rationalize it and that's just sad. This breach of privacy stuff is a slippery slope and Facebook will continue to chip away at it until it's gone. To help people remember I've started: http://pleasedeletefacebook.com
Google IO brushed on this topic and quantised the marketing potential of different forms of broadcasting in a graph:

http://i.imgur.com/akG0F.png

TV advertisers are restricted to one way flow of information, so advertising is about building brand. It's difficult to convert this into conversions. On-line advertising however have accurate statistics because of the available analytical software. Advertisers stick to conversions only as it's still a wild west when it comes to accurate impressions (even Facebook has been caught cheating on viewer counts). Until advertisers cater to surfers the full potential of on-line advertising won't be realised.

I assume it's what caused the shortfall in Google IO's graph, I personally feel on-line marketing understated as a medium.
Thanks! I put it up as a quick weekend project about 3 months ago.

I wanted to make it easy to comment, list & help out. The thing Ive realized about this type of site is that it needs the power of the crowd to review the posts & recognize people in photos. That's what I'm working on now.
It doesn't matter if the customer never drives more than 195 miles, if they won't buy a car that can't go at least 300 miles.

[edit] Also I was specifically addressing battery vs. oil not ICEVs vs EVs
Agree that it isnt currently fluid enough from a UX standpoint. But precisely why all of us should get behind HTML5 and push it harder.

That's why we decided to contribute our resources towards it and wanted to encourage the community to support HTML5 as well.

The last thing we want happening is that folks stop developing for HTML5 since one of the big boys out there feels otherwise.
I'd probably just say, "I'm sorry to have wasted your time--I'm not interested in the position after all," and then get up and leave the interview.
Am I the only person who read the title of this as "Homoerotic erection"? I really hope not.
You sure that IE isn't?

Well actually, you're probably right, considering Trident also runs on Windows CE. But I'd be surprised if they went to the bother of bypassing Win32.
Only if by "look[ing] good", you mean it changes your opinion of them. From most perspectives it doesn't really matter when they decided to move in this direction since it's their data. It's the same thing we've seen over and over, where a small guys builds on someone else's platform, and the platform provider uses their inherent advantages to take over.
One of the things that frustrates me is that phone companies will carry calls purporting to be from numbers that don't terminate. Why would they ever think that was a good idea?

You get a scammer, they've sent their [spoofed] number, you ring it and get 'boo-boo-boop this number is not recognised'. The phone company knows the numbers that aren't taken because they use that list when you set up a new phone line.

Though it does just strike me that it's possible the number actual did terminate but the scammers pretend it didn't; but that seems a long shot.
Worth noting that a lot of the profile pics in the search results are NSFW.
PG: Do you have further thoughts on your previous note
Having in mind the latest bad news coming out of the bay's public companies (Ex zynga):

You mentioned a bit back that entrepreneurs should prepare for a funding winter, should we start preparing for a blizzard/ice-age/coldmetaphorofchoice?
Fully homomorphic encryption reduces the communication necessary for MPC to a minimum. Since FHE is, at the moment, way too slow to be useful, work has gone in the direction of mixing classic techniques with somewhat homomorphic encryption, cf. http://eprint.iacr.org/2010/514 http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/535 http://eprint.iacr.org/2011/663
The first question in their FAQ addresses suing them, to which they claim they are immune because of the Communications Decency Act, specifically, the part that provides immunity to ISPs and forums: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act#Sect...

I wonder, however, if the law cannot distinguish between, say, Hacker News and Potential Predators. Hacker News as an entity is a free-form discussion site, with no particular agenda other than being a forum for discussion. Potential Predators is not a discussion site, and it has a clear agenda. Reasonable people will assume that HN itself does not endorse individual comments. But reasonable people may assume that Potential Predators endorses individual submissions that they post. I can easily draw a distinction between the two. But I'm not sure if the law does.

In fact, I would go so far as to say that they do endorse individual submissions. I think that puts them closer to libel laws that apply to newspapers. It would be absurd for, say, the NY Times to try to use the CDA to defend itself from a libel suit by saying, hey, we just provide a forum for news articles; we're not responsible for what our reporters put up here.

That may be a crucial distinction, in fact: at the NY Times, the person who writes the article does not post it. It goes to an editor, and then presumably to someone on the technical side. I wonder if Potential Predators curates the submissions, and if they do, if that effects their responsibility in any way.

If grellas is around, I would love to hear his take.
It's a realistic model, sure, but the stakes aren't the same.

In a meeting or presentation, you have a subject and an agenda and many people present who expect you to cover them.

In an interview, it's one-on-one. If the interviewer asks you A, then stops and asks you B, there's no reason not to move to B. If the interviewer is suddenly asking about B, they must want to know about it. There are no other stakeholders present who might care more about A. You didn't even know you were going to be talking about A until a few minutes before!

It's an important skill to be able to say "no" and stay focused on a subject. But this is a shitty test for finding out whether a person has that skill.
Why Netbot should look like Tweetbot
Well yeah, but then you're basically putting the meat of the NN algorithm into the SVM. I'd call the resulting algorithm a neural network with an SVM frosting. You might as well train naive bayes directly on the final nth layer of the NN instead of SVM on the (n-1)th layer, would be an almost equally weak argument for the thesis that NNs are not superior to the other algorithms on this task, since basically all the power is coming from the NN.
How is the title provocative?
Thanks again, it's these kind of comments that make HN shine. First thing I'll do is a restyle to make sure people don't bet their lives on the site.

After that, it seems I've some extensive reading to do...
Hey Andrew - Art Sumo works by sending out weekly emails of original art from around the world. You can purchase the painting contained in the email if you get to it first.

About the question of why this format, we decided to go with this to 1 - let people passively stay connected with art from different cultures and 2 - to create a sense of excitement to see each painting 3 - it replicates a gallery experience more closely where you examine paintings in this manner and 4 - when the paintings are directly marketed like this, the paintings sell.

Sure others are selling socks and diapers in this manner (via regular updates groupon style) as well. You can also buy those products using different channels as well (like art).
>You will probably will get the same mess. There is plenty of literature about that. I.e: A complete rewrite is what killed Netscape

That's a meme started by a Joel Spolsky article, and maybe an allusion to the "second system effect" (which is about something else altogether). Hardly "plenty of literature about that".

Actually, the complete rewrite might killed Netscape, but it saved Mozilla and Firefox. And Netscape was a multi-million line web browser engine, with a javascript interpreter, a full mail client and a wysiwyg editor thrown in. And multi-platform in C/C++ to boot.

That is, something an order of magnitude more difficult than LinkedIn or 99% of web properties out there.

There have been TONS of successful rewrites. Especially in the web space, it's almost trivial to rewrite your webapp or parts of it. To name but a few:

Twitter, the new Digg, SoundCloud, Basecamp, etc etc.
We've been using perfect audience at BugHerd for a while now and I'm an unashamed fan (first twitter follower even!). Great product with amazing support! Best of luck guys!
Hmm. So the argument that web will eventually over take native mobile apps has been made over and over. Sure an O(n lgn) algorithm is better, but if the constants are bad enough, I'm going with the O(n^2). Even the author admits that native apps were around for nearly 20 years. Accounting for the fact that things move faster now so it might be less, we're still only a couple years into a decade long era of installed mobile applications. Then, we still have to account for the bad network connections on the phone that make web apps harder to work with.

While I'm skeptical of the mobile argument, I'm super excited about html5 dev conf because I do think HTML5 is going to be big on desktop/laptops.
Normal people are willing to trade a bit of security away for convenience. Your system might be easier to learn, but using it doesn't appear much more convenient than using GPG, so it is necessarily going to have to live up to the standards of a more paranoid crowd.
The biggest problem with these types of apps is that taking a screenshot or copying the MSG is all it takes to destroy any encryption you might have had.

They are fun apps to write and think about though.
Sounds like a pretty good example of why people who really "have nothing to hide" still need and deserve privacy.
They just wrote a Ruby interpreter for Node.js. Node.js is just that fast.
Tell HN: Not startup related, just reminding you to REGISTER TO VOTE and GO VOTE
I was almost certain[1] that Craigslist was working on PadMapper like interface and it was the reason they sued. They should have done the right thing and hire/buy one person company PadMapper.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4149263
Protection Racket 2.0
Don't forget source map support, that is a huge plus to have from day one.
All of their privacy breaches don't really matter if you consider all of the things that you do with Facebook to be explicitly public. My only privacy filters are discretion and sobriety, and they've worked well enough so far.
Touché. See Camper Bob's response for something that would make more sense.
I used Kodu with kids between 5-9 years on a summer camp, they caught up very quickly. The interface was pretty cool and straightforward, they loved being able to modify the terrain.

I always told them like: "Kodu is hungry and wants to eat some apples", or "can you help Kodu find X", etc.
Kodu (the robot) became kind of a character/friend they empathized with, which eased having their attention and interest.

Only downside I saw was its cpu and memory consumption.
They needn't have sued. If their implementation was as good as padmapper or better, then padmapper would've lost their audience anyway.

We could argue whether it is good or bad for platforms to copy a feature and push services like padmapper out, but it is still their platform. But a big guy suing a small guy, especially when he was making the service better definitely looks like bullying.
Ask HN: How did Facebook initially limit users to universities?
Hi all, I'm wondering, programatically, how Facebook initially limited people joining their site to those at specific universities (i.e., @harvard.edu).

Was it as simple as cross referencing the user's email domain to a list stored on their servers of approved schools and then confirming the account through email? I feel like there should be a more robust solution, but I'm not sure what it could be.
Internet Users Spend 426 Million Hours a Year Solving CAPTCHAs - Infographic
There are more than 280 million CAPTCHAs solved on the Web each day. Each CAPTCHA takes an average of 15 seconds to solve. That adds up to more than 426 million hours a year, forcing people to decipher illegible text. At the same time, businesses waste millions of dollars trying to capture consumer attention through online ads, which are mostly ignored.
Ask HN: Review my startup - pinad.com.au
A while ago I launched https://pinad.com.au and I'm looking for feedback and comments.

pinad.com.au is a general classifieds tool + awesome search. I know it's a boring area, but I've also seen a lot of complains on HN about massive players in this field not providing 1/10th of the features I provide. You may experiment these features here (use the left-menu options and see the content of Category & characteristics section):

https://pinad.com.au/search

https://pinad.com.au/items/new

I'm interested to understand how easy/hard is for somebody to use it (from a flow perspective) and also what do you think about the UI/UX. Would you use such a tool to post your own listings or search for listings?

You may see existing listings here: https://pinad.com.au/browse . No account is required to browse or post new entries.

Thanks, I appreciate your time. Adrian
I've done this a few times at work - they are very convincing. This would definitely catch some of the MS Windows users I know.

One time the Asian guy on the other end (who couldn't pronounce what he said was his name) accused me of wasting his time and said that they were going to invoice me! That was probably the funniest.

After a couple of goes around it gets boring. Now I just go along for the first bit and then say I have to put the phone handset down to type and leave the phone on the side until it screeches at me that I've forgotten to put it 'on the hook'.
Arrow keys should work for you, too.
I'm going to guess that it's two autocorrect errors. :-)
Consulting companies built their reputations on their work in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. They encouraged companies to do things we now consider Business 101 (it was cutting-edge stuff back then though). Several major companies in the 1960s had no insight into their competitors or even a full picture of the market they were in. These were the sort of organizations that collected very little data beyond sales and balance sheet figures - it was like they lived in a "bubble". The pioneering consulting firms popped those bubbles and actually taught businesses how to do basic market analysis, and turn that analysis into business strategy.

If you're at all curious, I'd recommend reading The Lords of Strategy by Walter Keichel, which a (albeit opinionated) history of the consulting practice.
Oh, what I meant was that software does also have a history of such roles. Today, developers are mostly men, but QA and documentation seem to be female-dominated.
>Choose any technology or any API you want and build a mobile or mobile-web application that showcases HTML5’s capabilities

>- Both web or mobile web apps are fine.

Is it me or this is quite confusing ? Could someone from Filepicker.io make this clear, please ? :)
Facebook's first video advertisement [for itself]
It wasn't that she was "outed", but that the Maine GOP used the (public) fact that she plays a game enjoyed by millions as the basis for a shameful smear campaign.

If the people in Maine decide that playing WOW is enough to decide their vote, then I guess they'll get the representatives that they deserve.